Quote

People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Men
Courses
Comparison
People
Course
Compare
Lives
Familiar
Need
Somehow
Take
Connected
Great
Sea
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Seek
Hemingway
Always
Writer
Flattered

More quotes by Yann Martel

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It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.
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India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
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If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
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Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
Yann Martel
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Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
Yann Martel
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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
Yann Martel
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The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
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Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this.
Yann Martel
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Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
Yann Martel
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You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?
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It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
Yann Martel
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I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.
Yann Martel
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For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.
Yann Martel
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There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.
Yann Martel
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When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
Yann Martel
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...animals don't escape from somewhere but from something
Yann Martel
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How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
Yann Martel
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At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Yann Martel
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I love Canada. Its a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.
Yann Martel